Nous aussi nous souvenons

Once, the French colony of Acadie ranged across what are now the Maritime provinces and present-day Maine; its first settlements are the earliest instances of a permanent French presence in North America. Concordia historian Ronald Rudin provocatively observes that the Acadian story offers an alternate genealogy of French Canada, challenging the dominant account—myth, as it turns out—that Champlain’s 1608 founding of Quebec City marks “the beginning of French Canada, if not Canada more broadly.”

But Rudin’s provocation does not quite deliver, and it is not because his account of Acadian memory lacks thoroughness or subtlety. He does a lovely job of explaining tensions in the Acadian community over how to treat the past. He is superb at showing that the Acadian story is also an aboriginal story—the two communities’ experiences of dispossession in the past, and struggles for recognition in the present, are historically closely intertwined. And he renders his account even more complex and interesting by discussing how anglophone neighbours, Quebec politics and the provincial and federal governments stake their claims on Acadian memory.

Yet even as I admired Rudin’s efforts to affirm Acadia’s historical significance and complicate how we think about French Canada’s beginnings, I was wearied by his unremitting focus on origins and founding narratives to the exclusion of other compelling questions. Superficially, it is clear why this is so, as the book is about the commemoration of specific historic anniversaries.

Quebec City’s quadricentenary was celebrated last year with due pomp, but 2004 and 2005 were also quadricentenaries: of the first Acadian settlement of Île Ste-Croix, which was established in 1604 and lasted the winter, and of Port-Royal, founded the following year in present-day Nova Scotia. The low-key celebrations marking these anniversaries were entirely in character, since according to Rudin the Acadian past has remained “something of a mystery” to most Canadians. In part, this is because Acadia ceased to exist. The British expelled much of the French-speaking population in 1755, an event Acadians call the Grand Dérangement, and which we would today term ethnic cleansing. The expulsion’s 250th anniversary coincided with the 2005 Port-Royal quadricentenary, and the book is organized around this poignant cluster of anniversaries (and their earlier iteration in 1904, 1905, 1955, etc.). Rudin examines the contested commemorations of these anniversaries by visiting museums and memorials, attending performances and ceremonies, and even participating in a procession retracing the routes of the deportation.

This method of participatory observation—he describes himself as an embedded historian— allows Rudin to amass a diverse collection of materials in all sorts of media. From it, he extracts a rich narrative, and he also makes a great deal of it available as videos and photographs on the interactive website accompanying the book (see <rememberingacadie.concordia.ca>). Even when he is working with more conventional archival materials to fill in the earlier history, he wrings a lot of analysis out of what he has.

He suggests that there has been progress over time, for example when he discusses the transformations that make the recent quadricentenaries so different from the commemorations a hundred years ago. Back in 1904, J.W. Longley, the anglo-phone attorney general of Nova Scotia, staged a tercentenary celebration of the Port-Royal settlement, hoping to encourage tourism and economic renewal. Longley did not involve the Acadian community in his plans, and the Mi’kmaq, who had developed close relations with the settlers and whose chief, Membertou, was left in charge when the French party decamped in 1607, seem barely to have crossed his mind. Such blatant exclusion was paired with more subtle revisionism: the 1904 celebrations pointedly focused on Pierre Dugua, a Protestant, sidelining the Catholic Samuel de Champlain. This, Rudin explains, was intended to undermine the founding status of French Catholics at a time when they were demanding greater recognition; the fear was that “in the Canadian context the parallel treatment of the two men somehow legitimized the recognition of two cultures.” Rudin offers this example to show how selective and instrumental the tercentenary was in its approach to the past, and to indicate some of the tensions and inconsistencies that appeared when the anglophone population tried to commemorate the Acadian past—an issue that has not gone away.

But as Rudin goes on to trace the Acadian community’s increasing agency in the commemoration of their history over the next hundred years, the debate about Champlain’s and Dugua’s relative status as founding fathers takes on a peculiar centrality. Advancing a claim on one of these men and a corresponding settlement seems to become the measure of Acadian memory’s autonomy and growing assertiveness. Even as he shows that any particular narrative about the past is constructed and negotiated, the result of struggles over meaning and the competition of interests, Rudin suggests that it is by taking possession of their earliest beginnings that Acadians might ensure their self-actualization in the present and guarantee the vitality of their identity in the future.

Such a repossession of the past is not easy. Elizabeth Jelin, an Argentinean social scientist, has come up with the rather apt term “memory entrepreneurs” to describe those activists who work to legitimize their versions of the past, and Rudin devotes a lot of attention to such individuals in the Acadian context. His memory entrepreneurs are not heroic; there is lots of political manoeuvring, and even as the community grows in strength there are lingering traces of a mood of bonne entente—a reluctance, that is, to seem combative or accusatory about the expulsion. Most importantly, these entrepreneurs often fail, encountering resistance and lack of interest. This is largely because of the preeminence of the Grand Dérangement in the Acadian imagination. While the expulsion destroyed Acadia, it also created the Acadian diaspora, and so it has long possessed its own foundational significance.

Despite all this, the memory entrepreneurs try to use the quadricentenaries to establish an emotional connection to the early settlements and their physical sites. Although they are not wholly successful, Rudin suggests that their attempt is part of an effort to redefine Acadian identity to “emphasiz[e] its modernity and marginaliz[e] its legacy of trauma and victimization.” And while in 1904 the anglophone organizers suppressed the Catholic Champlain and his associations with French Canada in favour of Dugua, a century later the Acadian community reclaims the Protestant Dugua in an effort to differentiate their particular history from Quebec’s history, with which Champlain is so powerfully associated.

These are certainly transformations of Acadian memory. But in Rudin’s account, it strikes me that these developments start to look like the maturation of Acadian memory. Even as he draws attention to the specific historical circumstances of the deportation and subsequent Acadian revival that make the early history seem remote, as a historian he is convinced of the early settlements’ significance, and one hears a trace of regret as he observes their erasure. Commenting on a theatre production at the 2004 anniversary that wrongly has the French landing at Port-Royal in 1604, he writes:

Similarly, the Acadian memory entrepreneurs are the plucky underdogs in this scenario. They are up against the Canadian government, which opportunistically uses the quadricentenaries to strengthen its economic ties with France (at the Acadians’ expense), as well as a hostile and paternalistic Quebec that sees the commemoration of 1604–05 as a threat. Ironically, Rudin consistently refers to the settlements as sites of memory, even though most of the time they appear to be nothing of the kind for almost everyone else. The book is an attempt to correct that lacuna, and to reinscribe the history of those early settlements a little more firmly into public memory.

This is mostly commendable, and it is certainly well done, but it also implies that Acadian memory comes into its own by casting itself further back in the past than it has generally tended to go. Doing so allows Acadian identity to assert its founding status, disrupting the dominant narrative about Canada’s beginnings and claiming political recognition for itself in the process.

But in a multicultural Canada, the question of what founding status means is actually far more complex. There is a quiet contract that regulates the relationship between the founding peoples and the non-founding minority groups that are politically recognized while never being original or foundational in quite the same way. At the same time, the relationship among the founding peoples is itself rather vexed: in the original formulation of two nations (French and English), the former is something of a junior partner in the process of state building; recent well-intentioned references to three founding nations, if taken literally, would imply that aboriginal peoples were a willing party to the founding of a state that then went about disenfranchising them. So in the face of all this, what does it mean to render the Acadian story as a founding story? And if the Acadian story offers an alternate genealogy of a French Canada long dominated by the experience of Quebec, does this alter any of the other longstanding relationships that characterize contemporary Canada?

In fact, Rudin makes a compelling start on the second question, arguing that one of the most significant victories of the recent commemorative activity belongs to the Passamaquoddy First Nations. The transborder tribe is not recognized in Canada, and has long encountered resistance to any such recognition. The community’s participation in the Île Ste-Croix quadricentenary, however, generated some solidarity in the region, and the federal government has now allotted the tribe some funds to go about establishing its claim. Clearly, then, a transformation of the status of Acadian memory can alter the balance of things.

But what is missing, leaving me irked by the insistent focus on founding narratives and founding status, is any substantive discussion of Acadian memory in light of Canadian discourses about minorities and multiculturalism. As Rudin tells it, the late 1970s are a pivotal moment for the Acadian community. As it prepared to commemorate the 375th anniversary of Port-Royal in 1980, the community found its voice, and Rudin describes the 1980 events as “overtly political … by far the most explicitly political ones to be discussed in this book.” This new-found cultural pride and assertiveness about Acadia’s place in history is summed up in the slogan of the 1980 events: “We Came … to Stay.” Interestingly, the transformation coincided with the first years of official multiculturalism in Canada, and was sandwiched between Trudeau’s 1971 announcement of multiculturalism in a bilingual framework and the 1985 Multiculturalism Act. The phrase “We Came … to Stay” emphasizes the act of migration and, in 1980, it could just as easily have been the slogan of any of the well-established immigrant communities, such as Ukrainians or Italians, who had lobbied for multiculturalism (rather than biculturalism) in an effort to secure recognition as non-founding peoples of long standing in Canada. It seems crucial to consider how the context of official multiculturalism may have shaped the Acadian community’s sense of self over the last 25 years.

This is especially important since we can understand multiculturalism cynically—as a strategy that preserves the subordinate place of migrant communities while seeming to celebrate them, and that effectively helps maintain the contract between founding peoples and others. It is fascinating in this case that the Acadian community is trying to establish its founding status, but may be doing so in a way that draws on the political resources and cultural resonance of multiculturalism, usually understood to be directed at non-founding peoples and newer immigrants.

Sadly, Rudin does not explore these tensions and connections. This is all the more disappointing because there are indications all over the book that there is an important connection here, and Rudin knows it. When the Acadians started raising their voices in the late 1970s, Rudin describes it as very much “in the spirit of the time.” Acadians themselves worried that they will be turned into “an ethnic group and their culture into folklore,” and the term “multiculturalism” was put to strategic use by the English population in Port-Royal when they played “to notions of multiculturalism without providing any particular emphasis upon the existence … of a vibrant French population.” Rudin’s interview subjects make some very suggestive comments, such as one woman who proudly lays claim to the celebration while emphasizing that her roots are neither French nor English, but “Canadian.”

Rudin acknowledges that the Acadian past has a special salience “in the highly charged atmosphere of Canadian identity politics in the early twenty-first century.” But he does not really take on what this means, which is especially a pity since his work is substantially about the memory of historical injustice and trauma—a field of study that could really use a more sustained engagement with discourses on multiculturalism, identity and migration.

For the past couple of decades, there has been a surge of scholarly and popular writing on the role of memory in creating and sustaining group identity. Such memory is variously described as “collective memory,” “cultural memory” and “public memory.” Recently, we have seen that such memory is very powerful when it is evoked by groups whose stories have been neglected or forgotten. This is especially so when the forgetting has followed great historic traumas or disruptions, such as internment and expulsion. By now it is common for marginalized or discriminated-against communities to make political claims in the present by way of a narrative about the past. Potentially, they empower themselves and reclaim their identity in the process. Or, as some have suggested—allies of minority and disadvantaged populations among them—we all become obsessed with identity politics based on injury and ressentiment.

Those of us interested in memory need to keep thinking about this last proposition and its troubling implications, and do more work on the relationship of memory to multiculturalism and to identity politics. Case studies from Canada are particularly interesting in this respect, because of Canada’s very particular articulation of multiculturalism. All of this is humming away in the background of Rudin’s book, and in the final 50 or so pages he does make some general comments about what has been called the age of apology, drawing connections between the Royal Proclamation of 2003 and other state apologies we have witnessed in recent years, such as the ones issued for Japanese internment and abuse in the residential schools. But while the book stands alone as a compelling work on Acadian commemorative projects old and new, it also represents something of a missed opportunity, perfectly poised as the topic is between the questions of founding nations, multiculturalism and memory.